AI startup Flourish reportedly raises $500M round backed by Jeff Bezos
Flourish Inc., a startup developing artificial intelligence models inspired by the human brain, has raised $500 million in funding at a $2.5 billion valuation.
Wired reported today that about a fifth of the capital was provided by Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos. The rest came from a consortium that included Alphabet Inc.’s GV startup investment arm, Lux Capital and healthcare-focused fund Catalio.
Flourish is looking to develop AI models that require significantly less power than large language models. According to the company, a server-grade graphics card uses about 30 times more energy to process information than the human brain. Flourish hopes to reduce that power draw by more than an order of magnitude.
The company was founded last year by former Amazon executive Rob Williams and Thomas Reardon, a prominent neuroscientist. Reardon played a key role in the development of Internet Explorer. He later co-founded a startup called CTRL-Labs that Meta Platforms Inc. bought in 2019. CTRL-Labs’ technology underpins the Meta Neural Band, a wristband that enables users to control smart glasses with hand gestures.
